Have We Forgotten How to Be Bored?

I was talking to someone recently when, halfway through the conversation, they reached for their phone. Nothing had gone off. There was no message they were waiting for and no call coming through. They just picked it up, looked at it for a few seconds, put it back down and carried on talking. A minute or so later, they did exactly the same thing again.

I don't think they even realised they were doing it, which is probably why it stuck with me. Not because I thought they were rude, but because I realised how normal that kind of behaviour has become. I probably do my own version of it all the time. Five spare minutes, standing in a queue, waiting for somebody to arrive, sitting somewhere on my own and suddenly there is this instinct to fill the gap with something.

It made me wonder whether we have forgotten how to be bored.

When I was a kid, boredom was just part of life. You told your mum you were bored and she would normally offer you a list of jobs that made boredom suddenly seem quite attractive. So you went outside instead. You kicked a football against a wall, rode your bike somewhere without having any real destination, knocked for your mates or made up some completely ridiculous game that somehow occupied an entire afternoon.

If you grew up anywhere like I did, knocking on somebody's door and running away was also considered perfectly acceptable entertainment.

There was no device in your pocket capable of rescuing you from every quiet moment. If nothing was happening, you had to find something to do, and sometimes you simply had to sit there until an idea appeared.

I think I miss that more than I realised.

Not necessarily the door knocking, although I imagine Ring doorbells have ruined that anyway, but the sense that every empty moment didn't need filling.

I've started noticing it in myself because I am actually terrible at doing nothing. I write, I draw, I train, I swim, I find another job that needs doing or another idea that needs developing. Most of those things are genuinely good for me and I enjoy them, but I've also started asking myself a slightly uncomfortable question.

Am I doing this because I want to, or because I don't want to sit still?

That distinction interests me because from the outside the two can look exactly the same.

Going to the gym can be something that clears your head, but it can also be somewhere you go because you don't particularly want to hear what is going on inside it. Writing can help you understand what you think, but it can also become another thing to occupy yourself with. Even swimming, which I love partly because nobody can interrupt me when my head is underwater, can still be another way of making sure I am always doing something.

I'm not suggesting any of that is unhealthy. I certainly don't intend to stop training, writing or disappearing into a swimming pool whenever I get the chance. I've just become more curious about the difference between something restoring me and something distracting me.

I think there is a big difference between the two.

The strange thing about modern life is that genuine boredom has become surprisingly difficult to find. We can fill almost every gap now. Standing in a queue, waiting for a train, sitting in the car for five minutes or lying awake at night, there is always something available to occupy our attention.

And I wonder whether we lose something when we remove all of those gaps.

Some of the most useful thoughts I've had haven't appeared because I sat down and tried to solve something. They've appeared when I've been walking, driving or sitting somewhere without deliberately thinking about anything at all. My head has wandered around for a while and eventually landed on something I hadn't really been paying attention to.

Sometimes it's an idea. Sometimes it's something that has been bothering me more than I realised. Sometimes it is just the recognition that I am knackered and probably don't need to start another bloody project.

Those thoughts are rarely loud. They don't arrive with some great moment of clarity. They tend to appear quietly when there isn't much else competing with them.

Perhaps that is what boredom used to give us.

Space.

Not enlightenment. Not mindfulness. Not some grand opportunity to discover who we really are. Just a bit of mental space where nothing was demanding our attention and the brain could wander wherever it wanted.

I don't think the answer is to become anti-phone or start pretending everything was better in the eighties. Plenty of it was objectively terrible. We had three television channels, cars that barely started in winter and children's playgrounds that appeared to have been designed by people who actively disliked children.

But we did have more empty space.

And perhaps that is part of what I was trying to capture when I wrote When Time Was Still Ours. On the surface it is a children's story about a ten-year-old boy travelling back to the 1980s, but underneath it is really about something I think we have slowly lost. A childhood where being bored didn't mean something had gone wrong. It often meant something was about to happen.

The same thought sits behind Stop Numbing Your Life, although from the adult end of things. That book came from noticing how easy it is to keep ourselves permanently occupied without ever really asking what we are trying so hard not to feel.

I still don't think distraction is the enemy. Sometimes I want to train because I enjoy training. Sometimes I want music on because I love music. Sometimes I want to draw because I want to create something. Not everything needs analysing to death.

But I am trying to leave a few more gaps.

To walk occasionally without needing anything in my ears. To sit somewhere without automatically reaching for my phone. To let myself be bored for five minutes without immediately deciding I should be doing something productive.

Mostly nothing particularly exciting happens.

But maybe that is the point.

Because I am beginning to think boredom was never really empty. It was simply one of the few times when nothing else was trying to tell us what to think about.

And perhaps we could all do with a little more of that.